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I am a big fan of WebSense and there is a new product called WebSense Express but is there any other products in this space?

One ideal feature would be self-service - users could go and see where they rank in surfing activities or what pages they hit the most (try and self manage their wtime or just provide awareness to how many times they hit Facebook.com, etc).

I am not looking for a URL filter although that would be a great feature - more URL Reporting or Monitoring.

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I should throw out there we use Juniper NetScreen firewalls so it could work with the firewall or via a port mirror (WebSense). – Rob Bergin Jun 1 '09 at 18:36
And I am considering this one marshal8e6.com/solutions/web_security/webmarshal.asp – Rob Bergin Jun 1 '09 at 18:39
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OpenDNS is a free alternative... A lot of corporations are using OpenDNS now (ie. Kaiser Permanente, Fujifilm, and UPS to name a few)

opendns.com

A few of the things:

  1. Can be customized with your logo or picture
  2. You can block entire categories of websites
  3. The categories are constantly being updated by a vast Open Source community.
  4. You can pull down network usage statistics
  5. You can create "shortcuts" which are keywords that resolve to your favorite sites (Like cname records)
  6. It's FREE
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I looked at this - it appears cool but not sure they drilldown into the URLs (you would only use DNS for the FQDN not the whole URL) - I will give them a call and ask them. – Rob Bergin Jun 1 '09 at 20:06
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Rob, I can't post URLs since my rep is low but here's a webinar an OpenDNS employee recorded. The Jan 30th one might provide you more of an indepth view of the web GUI at work: opendns.com/customers/webinar/ – Will Jun 1 '09 at 20:13
cool - I will check out the webinar. – Rob Bergin Jun 2 '09 at 2:13
hey so this is pretty neat- not quite what I want - but I am waiting to pass judgement until I can check it out. – Rob Bergin Jun 2 '09 at 19:19
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up vote 0 down vote

You can use squid proxy server and some log analyser. Squid will allow you to filter URLs. Log analyser will tell how much bandwidth users are consuming. If users are many 1500+ then freely available log analysers don't work very well. You might have to write your own log analyser in that case based on how much information you want to show to users.

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up vote 0 down vote

I think you would be best looking at one of the content filter products - simply because there's not much (any?) on the market that just monitor.

I work for SmoothWall (http://www.smoothwall.net) - we produce a url & content filter with extensive reporting. This includes a feature for "non admins" to see reports. This is intended for managers etc. but I don't see why it couldnt be bent into doing "self service". You'd be welcome to give it a shot anyway - my email is tom at (see web address) if you want to try that.

In the interests of impartiality...

  • roll your own with squid - no "categorisation" of URLs and you will have to be a bit of a perl/php guru to roll your own reports, but it is a cheapish way to do things - also try squid + sawmill or other log analyser? Again you may have to do some perl bending...

  • other content filter vendors... ISTR 8e6 having a decent reporting box?

HTH,

Tom N.

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up vote -2 down vote

Well, here's another major product in that space.

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That works - I will just pack the office up and ship it to Mainland China. – Rob Bergin Jun 1 '09 at 19:06
For the record, I was making a political statement. And I'm perfectly happy with the inevitable downvotes that come with that. – chaos Jun 1 '09 at 19:32
For the record - we aren't interesting in being censors (aka Chinese goverment - we basically have a small internet pipe and just need to identify what's going across it - especially if its malware or antivirus URLs, etc. OpenDNS looks pretty promising (and its free). – Rob Bergin Jun 3 '09 at 14:38
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